Manage standing orders
Once a standing order is live, the work is no longer setup. It is the four actions below, and the twenty minutes a week somebody spends checking that last night's runs did what they were supposed to.
The four actions, and which one you want
| Action | Affects | The arrangement afterwards | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skip | Exactly the next run | Live; the run after happens normally | Betriebsferien, a full shelf, a delayed project |
| Pause | Every run until resumed | Live but dormant, with no next run date | A line down for a retooling of unknown length |
| Change | Every future run | Live, with new content or timing | Quantities drifted, an article was replaced |
| End | Everything from now on | Gone | The contract ended, the machine was scrapped |
The distinction people get wrong is skip versus pause. A buyer who says "not this month" wants a skip. A buyer who says "hold off for now" wants a pause, and a pause needs a review date attached to it, or it becomes silent churn.
Until the schedule ships, the same four actions exist as agreements: the buyer
tells you to skip a month, you leave the list untouched and do not convert it;
a pause is a note on the organization's timeline with a review date; an end is
the list being deleted or renamed Archiv – Wartung Halle 3.
Customer self-service
The buyer should be able to do most of this themselves, from their account area in the storefront. Which of the four actions they may take is your decision, and a reasonable split is:
| The buyer may | The buyer may not |
|---|---|
| Skip the next run | Change the price mode |
| Pause and resume | Change the owner |
| Change quantities on the underlying list | Change the approval path |
| Change the delivery address to another of their own | Extend beyond the agreed end date |
| End it | — |
Letting buyers end a standing order themselves feels wrong and is right. A buyer who cannot stop a recurring delivery without phoning you will never start one. What matters is that ending it produces a notification your team sees, so it becomes a conversation rather than a silent loss. See Recurring revenue health.
Changing the basket
Because a standing order runs an order list, changing what gets delivered means editing the list. That is deliberate: there is one basket, and both sides are looking at it. This part is real today.
Two consequences worth knowing:
- Edits apply to the next conversion, not the last one. An order already created is an ordinary order and is changed, or cancelled, as one. See Cancel or change an order.
- A shared list is visible to the whole organization. A list with
sharedon is read-only to everyone but its owner unless your tenant makes shared lists team-editable. If three people at the customer can edit the basket that generates deliveries, make sure all three know it.
When an article is discontinued, replace it on the list rather than letting a conversion drop it. A delivery that quietly ships nine of ten lines is worse than one that fails loudly.
Your team's view
Your Innendienst needs three lists, not one:
- Runs due in the next seven days, so a rep can call an account whose run is large or unusual before it fires.
- Runs that failed or were skipped since the last check.
- Paused arrangements older than sixty days, which is the churn list.
The second one is the operational list and should be empty most mornings. The third is a commercial list and should be worked monthly by whoever owns the account. Until the schedule ships, the first list is your calendar of agreed conversion dates, and the third is a segment on days since last order.
When a run does not produce an order
Work through it in this order. Most of the time it is one of the first three.
- Is the arrangement active? A pause set by the buyer three weeks ago is the single most common answer, and nothing is broken.
- Was the run date what you think it was? Check the next-run date rather than counting weeks in your head. A month interval on day 31 does not fire in February.
- Did it produce an order that is waiting for release? In the planned approval flow, a run whose value crosses the buyer's approval limit creates the order and holds it. Today the equivalent is an order your Innendienst put on hold with a hold reason. Look under Order Management › Orders, tab On hold, and see Stuck approvals.
- Did the conversion refuse? If your policy is to refuse the whole conversion when an article has disappeared, one discontinued line stops the entire run.
- Was there stock? See Common problems.
- Did the order get created but not transmitted? Then this is an integration question, not a recurring one. See Monitor your syncs.
What to check, weekly
- The failed-run list is empty.
- No arrangement has a next-run date in the past.
- Paused arrangements have review dates, and none is older than your threshold.
- Orders produced by runs are not on hold for longer than your approval SLA.
Next
- Common problems — symptom to cause.
- Recurring revenue health — reading paused and ended as commercial signals.